On Earth As It Is In Sweden

2012: A Year In Things That We Hate

You know what’s been hard during these long months of lockout-induced hockey privation? Having no socially-acceptable outlet for our hate. When you’re a sports fan it’s considered normal to violently hate an entity of an opposing team, including all the players and managers associated with it, any animals or historical figures that serve as its mascot, any colors it claims as its own, and especially anyone who has the gall and/or stupidity to cheer for it. This is a lot of hate a fan can carry in their heart, and no one thinks twice about it. But when you don’t have a sports outlet for your hate, it starts to look unseemly. But you know what? There’s no getting rid of it once the hate starts, and now that the Rangers and Flyers and Caps and Canada aren’t there for us to wish ill on, we’ve had to turn our bitter bile onto other subjects. And what’s drawn our ire in 2012? Well, here are the top three:

1. Cassadee Pope. Anyone else here watching “The Voice” during the lockout? Because that’s become our new obsession. And about midway through this season Schnookie declared, after another typically shrill, bombastically-phrased, “pop-rock” performance, that Cassadee Pope is “worse than Hitler”. And it seems that America is very fond of Hitler, because she just keeps on trucking, and will likely win next week. Ugh. America is apparently incredibly stupid and has terrible taste in music, because Cassadee Pope is so bad she’s like if Hitler played for the Rangers, but worse. That is not an exaggeration.

2. The new iTunes. If you’re also an iTunes user, have you made the mistake of upgrading yet? Because it’s maddeningly bad. Just awful, awful, awful, and we can’t seem to find anyone else online complaining about it. Why is that? Is the rest of the iTunes-using universe really completely enamored of a system that makes absolutely no sense at all? We’ve been happy iTunes users for years and years, and suddenly we both feel like some kid’s grandmother who’s logging on for the first time. Who thought such a counterintuitive, opaque, inscrutable format was a good idea, especially when its been a platform that has lapped its competitors for years because of its obvious usability? Fuck you, Apple! This new iTunes is like what Hitler would use if he was the DJ for the Rangers at a team party, and he really wanted to spin a bunch of Cassadee Pope tunes.

3. That KCRW took down the HD, standalone video of the Afghan Whigs doing “Mean Sleep” with Van Hunt. Sure, you can still hear it if you listen to or watch their entire “Morning Becomes Eclectic” appearance (it’s the second-to-last song), but it’s not in HD! And it’s not standalone, so we can’t just randomly queue it up when we’re looking for a musical pick-me-up or earhole cleanse, like, say, after we’ve just watched Cassadee Pope perform on “The Voice”. We’d make some kind of tasteless Hitler joke about this, but we don’t want KCRW to get mad and take the whole performance down entirely.

Hey Pam! Congrats on the job, although WTF to the no internet access??? Whenever I think about the possibility of trying to move on from my job, the unlimited internet access is one of the top reasons I dismiss the idea quickly. Heh.

I’ve never watched any of these reality/talent shows (The Voice, American Idol, etc). But I would like to ask whoever did the casting for it whether they realized that when you have someone who is named Cassadee, it’s going to be ugly. I mean, Cassadee????? Sigh. Why just not name her Iamabimbo?

OH MY GOSH I am so with you guys on the itunes hate. I already disliked itunes from it’s inability to play well with other music mp3 formatting (when I finally got an ipod, I had to transfer and convert all my mp3s from windows media player.. grrr) BUT i have come to use it and accept it.

But that update- what the what? It was SOOO bad that I actually haven’t looked at itunes since. It’s hideous. But I do hear that you can switch it back to the old look.. I dearly hope so.

Isn’t it THE WORST?!* (*That isn’t Cassadee Pope, I mean.) I would love to switch back to the old view. Sigh. I tried switching to Media Monkey (which I use with a different music player — one that allows FLAC files but doesn’t allow playlists [why does this all have to be so stupid?!? why can’t one device be perfect?!]) but it wasn’t happy about dragging files around on the ipod itself. (And yes, I realize these are the first-world’s problems first-world problems.)

Merry Christmas!!! I’m alive even if NHL hockey isn’t! (I differentiated because the Amerks are still kicking). I also found a way to get passwords to my old accounts otherwise lost on my dead laptop, so here I am typing on a new iPod touch that I barely know how to use!

My first response when opening up iTunes on this thing was “The fuuuuuu…. Whaaa… Well what do I do with this now?” So I’m in agreement on the iTunes update. Also I met Matt Barnaby. Not the most personable of folks but not the heinous mouth breather I imagined. Other than that, it’s been quite the effed up year.

Im not the best typer on this thing yet so I’ll skip attempting italics, but I read “Iamabimbo” with a lower case “L” and spent a hot minute trying to figure out what a llama bimbo is. I figured it was some new iPB vocab that I needed to study up on. And yes IPB auto corrected to a lowercase “i” as if you were an apple product. I left it considering this post.

Alright correcting the various auto corrects on this thing is exhausting, so I apologize for anything ridiculous I might have missed. Hope everyone had a great holiday!

Hey mcguggs! I’m so sorry you’ve had such an effed up year, but hey — Matt Barnaby! That’s cool. Ish. Maybe. Heh. Anyway, the most important thing to take away from 2012, I think, is that the new iTunes blows. ::dusts off hands:: And that’s about it.